On a recent time limited trip to New York I had a lot of thoughts whirling around my head about my observations on how the city and the population has evolved to interact depending on who they are, where they work, their social status since etc etc its highly unlikely anyone working in a service industry could actually afford to live in Manhattan.  Theres nothing unusual about this, we’re used to seeing London Boroughs pricing out folk but Manhattan being an Island somehow magnifies this.   Thus you have an unofficial segregation situation whereby the less well off occupants vacate it after work finishes.  As we were based in Jersey City for this trip I found myself part of this twice daily movement of humanity.

This is clearly a huge subject and I could spend many years trying to document, make sense and comment on this, I had various narratives flying around, mainly revolving around individual stories, maybe a series of portraits of the workers and how to tie this back into the architecture however that would have to be for another time but then something happened.

It rained.

 

Hurrying through showers, dodging puddles, hiding under brollies everyone was the same, a sudden and new, albeit temporary single common purpose, to stay dry.

Its not the answer to the big questions I was asking myself but it provided an opportunity to see how a simple thing, in this case rain, unofficially unifies the crowd.   For an unplanned off the cuff mini project I was very happy with this.  I tried stepping back and unusual for me getting in quite close for some images.  Whilst my observations about Manhattan remain unresolved this was fulfilling, everyone equal under the rain.